Playing Dead
by Melpomene melancholica
Summary: the Heel siblings have a little bit of trouble keeping in-character under the influence of alcohol, which results in pain and discomfort


Disclaimer: No monetary gains whatsoever (N.B. I don't protest to alms in form of mild ego-stroking, through. XD) Only borrowing Yoshiki Nakamura's mind-blowing work for much needed fun and escapism.

**Playing Dead**

The curious buzzing of the local press had intensified that evening when the mysterious Cain Heel, an intimidatingly striking actor that came out of nowhere to assume a secretive role in the next big action flick, was sighted to join the rest of the crew for a well-earned night out that the day after Christmas. Very little was known about this reclusive actor, and while he didn't reflexively bite at the fools who came too near him, it was a different matter for his sister/PA/bodyguard, a femme fatale in the body of a nubile virgin, whose very strut threatened to shove cameras and what-not up the wrong way of her brother's desecrators. The paparazzi was no match for her five-foot-and-change, leather-clad body and the I'm-so-gonna-kick-your-ass, metal-plated boots she wore like second skin. They didn't discover anything new that night, except for what everyone already suspected, which was that Cain Heel smoked like a Hokkaido fishing hut and could hold enough alcohol that would wipe out an entire Tokyo district.

The night went a little differently for one member of LME's Love Me section. Through the haze of more bar fumes and more sips of sake than she was used to, Kyoko was beginning to suspect she miscalculated somewhere. The movie management would have fervently invited the brooding actor to their after-shoot party, but they wouldn't have forced him to come. Setsu, not at all averse to hardcore partying and confident she could fend off all advances on him, had decided her brother was attending. When nobody had dared approach Cain Heel after they had eaten the first round of their enormous dinner, Setsu had gotten bold, began fingering the boundaries of her aniki's protective instincts. It didn't help that the very helpful girls around her were all-too-willing to let her sneak some sips of alcohol, if only to slightly loosen the protective cordon she drew around her brother. Oh, the boys kept strictly keigo-mode when conversing with her, but then, they didn't know her brother dear wasn't going to do anything she didn't want him to and he was quite a frightening man in his undecipherable, near-palpable silence.

See, each sip of sake, each shot of molten-silver tequila, each draft of the weirdly tinted concoction of who-knows-what, went down her gullet accompanied by a sparkling, challenging stare at her older brother. Cain merely looked on, unruffled and expressionless. It was all harmless fun and a good exercise for his kohai…

And then the dancing started.

_You think I'm pretty__  
__Without any makeup on__.  
__You think I'm funny__  
__When I tell the punch line wrong.__  
__I know you get me__  
__So I let my walls come down, down…_

"Katy Perry!" shrieked the busty make-up artist of her brother's model co-star, dragging her to the already filling dance floor. "Setsu-chan, you CANNOT miss this song!"

It was like being suckered into black hole. All sense dribbled out of Setsu's head, replaced by the rhythmic, primal pounding of the massive bass speakers that shook the entire edifice. Movements she didn't even know possible came to her, dictated the twists of her leather-hugged hips and the snake-like undulations of her torso that bared her mid-riff with each increasingly exaggerated contortion. It may have been the lighting, but she thought she could see the darkening expression of Cain Heel through the dizzying lights and the sultry fog of dry ice, could sense that silence congeal into a hulking, simmering oni on the dais that looked down upon the dance floor.

Hot hands on her naked back seared like a smoldering poker to her kidneys. She recoiled at what seemed like the worst pain in her life… but then suddenly the world refocused on the line-thin glare of her aniki, hovering above her, impossibly there in a fraction of a second.

He wordlessly investigated the flesh where the iron-wrought bar stool had struck her when she fell. Again the tingling, burning sensation that threatened to incinerate her straight through the core of her soul came, danced like the errant, un-choreographed mad caper of the film crew jammed in the rainbow-lanced dance floor.

"We're going home, Setsu," he said in a tone that boded no argument.

Setsu struggled to her feet, repentant and unsteady from the vertigo that had assailed her from nowhere. Her brother escorted her back to the hotel and dumped her on his bed, in his room. He carefully propped her on a pile of pillows, placed a warm compress to her head, set a glass of water on the bedside table, and draped a thin blanket to cover her. He didn't even blink when he unclasped her bra through the thickness of her bodice and unzipped the back of her pants to let her breathe easier. When he was satisfied she wasn't going to plop over in a puddle of her own vomit, her brother dear hurled himself to the loveseat flanking his bed and seemed to sleep as if one of the dead.

Setsu-or had she reverted back to Kyoko at some point during the entire spinning ride back to the hotel?-was feeling both guilty and gratified at the attention she was receiving from her aniki. She had her fun, and because she knew his odd enjoyments, she thought she gave him his, too. He probably enjoyed reliving the days when she was young enough to be the subject of such ministrations. He probably gloated privately when she ended up needing the help of her older brother after all, was not yet totally grown up and seducing every wandering male eye in the star-studded club, was merely teasing her brother, coaxing out the green-eyed monster from the depths of his poker stance.

Setsu (Kyoko) drifted to sleep.

###

Ren woke up a few hours later. It was an unceremonious sort of waking that wasn't preceded by vivid dreams or vicious nightmares. It just was, waking, and the moment before he opened his eyes, he collected himself neatly and decided on who would be looking out through those windows to the soul.

The emergence of Cain Heel was derailed by a shuffling sound. Ren—was it Ren?-froze in place, unwilling to move until he knew what character his companion, delicate in so many ways she didn't realize she was past the determined, zealous fierceness she embraced life with, until he knew what face to show her. But then, he didn't even dare crack an eye open, lest she catch him, see what horrors lurked beneath his lids when he wasn't playing a character.

"Aniki no baka," he heard her mutter, and he relaxed a few smidgeons, now knowing to where he should extrapolate his mental scenarios. "Sleeping in this sort of clothes."

"This sort of clothes" echoed hers, heavy, severe, and dark, made of expensive leather and commercial-grade metal trimmings. He could probably tear down buildings with his belt buckle.

"After drinking, too, and eating all that watermelon," she continued her murmured diatribes. "If you die from night-terrors, what am I supposed to do?"

That further derailed his plans on opening a fiercely-lined eye and scolding her back into bed for giving him a headache and for playing dangerous games with all those 'boys' he had to work with again tomorrow (which meant, more reasons to not bodily injure them). If any of them were to be indefinitely incapacitated because of her foolishness, the project would not go as plan and it would ruin a lot of people's well-laid plans and project scopes and charters. But that statement, that begrudging sense of duty, that was more of something Mogami Kyoko would say, albeit a Kyoko of years ago, the one that earned her a place in the rehabilitation project of the eccentric Takarada Lori. Should he be her wise senior now? Scold her for her flaky characterization?

"The way you turn me on, I can't sleep."

_Shit._

If the freezing was figurative earlier, he was definitely, literally frozen now. All of the temperate 37.6 degrees Celsius blood in his system has gone elsewhere, and rose to a boil, an incendiary lodged at the base of his spine, waiting to explode and strew his pieces on immaculate, thousand-count sheets.

"Let's run away and don't ever look back. Don't ever look back~"

_Ah._

He sighed explosively. She was just singing. She probably didn't even realize what the English lyrics meant, not because she didn't understand the language, but because they haven't clicked, weren't recognized as speedily because of its foreignness.

_Like how it had not clicked in her mind yet that she did turn them on unscrupulously, turned those beasts on like an executioner would flick the switch of an electric chair to damn him to his painful death… _

The dark-laced ire cleared when he realized she had stopped singing and that her hand had stopped as well, hovering just above his exposed bellybutton.

_Oh, but what wouldn't he give to feel the callused pads of her fingers about their sensitive periphery? For her lacquered, bejeweled nails to scrape the colorless down that peppered the road to perdition, the lovely lane spanning his navel to down under the black jeans that restrained his pelvis like shackles on a man sentenced for treason… _

"Aniki, you better not be playing dead," came the sulfurous warning of his sister. "Drinking too much and passing out on the sofa… Didn't even have the decency to undress himself. And if you end up constipated, sleeping with that belt strangling your stomach, it's gonna be my problem, too, isn't it?"

The address she used aside, it was definitely Kyoko that was speaking through and not the confident, half-brat, half-vixen sister that followed her asocial brother around. The alcohol was still clouding her mind, and it seemed she was only straddling the role she was supposed to play 24/7.

"We drove to Cali and got drunk on the beach," she continued singing. "Got a motel and  
built a fort out of sheets. Aniki, let's get you out of your jacket."

He tried his best to remain boneless and motionless as she carefully divested him of his coat. He wondered if she ever had to do this for anybody before, that she was so competent in divesting grown men of their coats like this.

"…missing… piece…" Grunt. Thrust. Shift. "Complete."

She fixed the pillow under him, patted him, then, solemnly pronounced,

"Let's go all the way tonight."

_Sweet baby Jesus on a hot pink jumpsuit! What manner of bodhisattva would deny himself that?_

And for oh so very briefly, he was deluded enough to think it might happen, for her hands fumbled on his belt buckles as she continued humming the chorus. At that juncture, his mind was empty, white. It didn't even occur to him to play dead when he felt himself being undressed, like a dead bear being skinned for meat in his unique brand of Freudian woods.

He was dead.

"You and I will be young forever." A pause. "Tsuruga-san, I guess you should keep your pants on."

He might have revived at that point, but the zipping of his fly was like the zipping of a body bag and Kyoko, Setsu, whoever, just mysteriously vanished from the hyperactive proprioceptors that told him where his soul mate sat, dutifully trying to make him comfortable. The deal was sealed. His coffin was nailed shut.

"You really should sleep in bed," he thought he heard vaguely.

A less stoic man than Cain Heel would be crying in pain now. See, Cain Heel didn't like to feel constrained and didn't want to decide the perennial question, boxers or briefs? He went with an utter lack of self-consciousness of one who did not lack anywhere and had nothing to be ashamed of.

He was, however, a skilled, fast-learner, who had mastered the respectful manner in which men in commando needed to treat their zippers. His head ached with the piercing clarity afforded by the sweet, hot pain in his groin. The saddest part was that it wasn't even _that_ kind of pain, but the pain of reality's talons in the form of a tinily caught curl of golden thread and an ultra-sensitive patch of now raw skin.

Neither Cain Heel nor Tsuruga Ren, Hozu Kuon nor his multitude of other selves, were able to sleep that night. He lay frozen on that short sofa, awake beneath the tight, tensed, grip of his eyelids around his eyeballs, painfully aware that a young girl had fallen asleep on the fluffy carpet at the foot of his bed.

It was a bad night all around.

###

Setsu woke up screaming the next morning, crying about the absolute protection of the golden family jewels and warding against botched dye jobs that shouldn't be performed except on hair growing from atop heads. She in turn woke up her elder brother Cain, who had just, just reached the cusp of the early stages of sleep. Setsu spoke of golden birch trees and fountains of youth, of bat-infested caverns and endless, spiraling, golden staircases. Pandora's box was made of denim and copper, and inside were spools of golden thread, harvested from the Golden Fleece by Jason and his Argonauts. Cain thought she was still drunk.

(Cain dreamed of having his tooth pulled by the dentist. No, it was not made of gold.)

Individually, Setsu and Cain decided they were better off forgetting the events of the crew's holiday party and instantly felt better. The disturbing dreams were better off sealed until their more appropriate counterparts were grown enough to face them and accept their consequences despite their respective… issues.

The film crew found that the Heel siblings were both markedly more irascible than usual that day, apparently due to a paired neck strain and the residual effects of alcohol. The paparazzi continued to live for disappointment and did not find out anything new that day, except that the project was making good time, and that reportedly Cain Heel had the prowess of the mythic Golden Bull of Heavens.

Whatever that meant.

1600 12262010

End.

Notes:

1. ... I'm sorry, Ren-sama. This is the sort of brain I have. D:

2. written for Miko-chan using the 31_days theme: December 14 [2010]: Dearest pain of my womb.


End file.
